


Not landing but falling

by TheFierceBeast



Category: Nathan Barley (TV)
Genre: Angst, First Kiss, Happy Ending, Injury, M/M, New Year's Resolutions, New Year's Resolutions 2015, Post canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-09
Updated: 2015-01-09
Packaged: 2018-03-06 21:09:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3148625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFierceBeast/pseuds/TheFierceBeast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan Ashcroft returns home from hospital to find Jones avoiding him and Claire annoyed with him. Business as usual, then.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not landing but falling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cambusmore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cambusmore/gifts).



He can't remember landing. That's meant to be good isn't it, not landing? It means you're not dead. Something like that, anyway, about falling in dreams, which Dan suspects applies to falling in real life too. He imagines all those killed unawares upon impact, drifting round as woeful ghosts, colourless and never realising they're dead: that's him, that is. Although now this unlucky ghost is starting to suspect his life has ended.

 

What he can remember is the jarring impact of the truck against his hip as he bounced off it, centimetres from - what? Salvation? Failure? It ended up, as usual, a weak, sterile middle ground between the two. He'd rattled between truck and abrasive scrape of wall like a shit pinball and then woken up, having missed the main event of impact, in a shrieking ambulance. He remembers thinking for a brief blissful moment then that he was back at home in bed.

So maybe that's the most enduring memory of the whole debacle: the quiet after the ambulance ride. The hospital, like an alien ship; so white and hushed and soft around the edges that it should have been heaven. They kept him doped up on painkillers so that he wasn't even aware of time or space. It should have been _heaven_. But the clean sheets and muted bleeps were more like a bad trip than a holiday. When the colours and the smells and the sounds he hated were taken, Dan was hit (ho ho) with the wrecking ball realisation that he missed them.

 

People came, of course. He has dreamscape memories of them passing in and out of his headspace like a bad montage in a feel-good movie: here, here are all those you care about, look at this reprieve you have been afforded and think on how you can now mend your ways and live happily ever after as a paragon of virtue. Except, those kind of films don’t usually feature nightmare visuals that linger, like that cock-smear Barley waving a contract under his nose, or Yeah (he refuses the question mark in his head) with some kind of bird of fucking prey or something. It was just hallucinations, though. Just the medication, couldn’t have been real. Claire he remembers mostly and knows those memories to be accurate from her mixture of berating and concern. There’s one person he doesn’t remember at all, though, and wonders what kind of trick his brain is playing on him by cutting him out. He must have been there; the evidence was left. When the static hiss in his head had calmed, Dan found thoughtful, useless things on the bedside locker that could only have been left by one person: lucky-dip charity shop copies of Viz and Amazing Spiderman, furry along the edges with years of reading; bags of Haribo that he wouldn’t eat if he was desperate; a memory stick that he knew with certainty would contain some aural carnage masquerading as music if only he had any means whatsoever to plug it in somewhere.

 

“I can’t remember Jones visiting me. In hospital.” He says. It’s his second day home and so far it’s been just him and Claire.

“That’s because he didn’t.”

“Oh. Right.” He lets that information settle for a moment. “Where did all the comics come from?”

“He gave them to me to pass on. He was busy.”

“Oh.” He’s not sure why that bothers him so much, but there’s just an undefinable something that Dan can’t quite put his finger on, like the near constant itch beneath the cast on his ankle that seems to be everywhere at once because he can’t scratch it. “Nice of him. To send stuff.”

“Mmm,” says Claire.

She’s obviously angry at him, but then again she’s always angry at him and it could be anything - the accident, why ever Jones is avoiding him - and asking would mean her telling him. He manages a sickly smile instead. “You know, when I was in hospital, I dreamt Nathan was doing some godawful Jackass rip-off and I had to star in it.”

“Oh no,” Claire says, not entirely sympathetically, “You remembered _that_ bit right.”

 

*

 

Dan is beginning to think that Jones is avoiding him. He’d deny it until he was blue in the face but he was quite looking forward to the comforting white noise of techno slaughter, but the house, upon his return, is almost as quiet as the hospital. It’s frankly unnerving.

“Where is he?” Dan asks. Claire flashes him an odd look. “Why’s he always out? Has he got a girlfriend or something?” This is greeted with a derisive snort of the _God, Dan_ , kind that she pioneered at around age ten and honed to perfection in the ensuing years and Claire slams her laptop shut and leaves the room. He briefly considers shouting after her. _Claire, I’m bored_. He almost does, too, but manages to bite his lip on it in time. Maybe he’s finally learning some impulse control.

 

Later, he runs into Jones, or rather Jones runs into him.

“Jesus _fuck_!” Jones sounds more shocked at Dan’s waking bellow of pain than Dan is about being woken by someone tripping over his injured leg.

“I was asleep!” Dan says, by way of startled excuse.

“Why’ve you got a blanket over your head like a fuckin’ budgie? I didn’t fuckin’ see you!”

“The curtains were open.”

His eyes adjust slowly to the rude daylight. Jones is standing over him with his hands on his hips, looking pissed off. The ache in his ankle starts to climb, inexplicably, chest-wards. Jones says, “You’re one lazy bastard, you know that?”

“I’ve got a broken ankle!”

Jones’s eyes flick towards the crutches leaning against the couch, and then at the open curtains, not two metres away. Dan can’t really argue with that kind of silent logic. “Where’ve you been?”

“Busy.”

“Yeah? Good busy, bad busy, work busy..?” he laughs nervously. When he shifts himself up higher on the couch, his bared teeth aren’t entirely through pain.

Looming over him, Jones folds his arms, cocking one hip out. He’s got his back to the window and his face is in shadow, his hair a spikey silver-edged halo, his voice just as jagged. “Did you know Pingu was there?”

 _What?_ Dan feels his own eyes widen, all idiot cartoony. “No, of cour-”

“-so it was an accident?” Jones interrupts.

“Well, yes.”

“You just wanted to get back at Nathan.”

“Yes.”

“Because he’s a prick.”

“Yeah.”

When put like that, it all seems so simple, so justifiable, so… unembarrassing. But Jones isn’t smiling. He says, “So cos you accidentally upset someone while you was trying to show up a sadistic wanker, you tried to off yourself and leave Claire and me without you.”

“Well, I didn’t exactly think it through did I? It was a sort of spontaneous act.” Dan tries to inject all the disdain he can muster into his words, but something isn’t right and hasn’t been right since he got home.

“Don’t think _much_ through, do you? You know that approach only works when you’re not a selfish miserable twat, right?” Jones seems to have bogarted all of the disdain in the world for himself. The front door resounds a crashing full-stop, as Dan suddenly realises something.

“Claire and _me_? Jones, what do you mean Claire _and you_?”

 

*

 

It’s so bloody, glaringly, bastard obvious when he thinks about it. He’s out of the house for two weeks and then, “Claire?” Thumps from the hallway. “Is that you?”

“Yeah.”

He closes his eyes in brief irritation at her weary tolerant tone. “Come here a sec.” When her reluctant silhouette is blocking the doorway he sucks a breath in, steels himself, and says, “Are you shagging Jones?”

“Ha!” Her one enunciated expulsion of laughter conveys so much.

“Wait, Claire - come back, what does that mean?”

There’s not even any point in trying to struggle up onto his crutches and follow her. From somewhere at the back of the house, her voice drifts back, “Dan, you are _so stupid_.”

He’s not sure why it’s even so important that he has to know for sure. It’s convenient. It’s logical. It explains so much. Really, he should be happy - Jones hates Nathan, and he hates Nathan, and Jones is a decent bloke, and he wants to see his sister with a decent bloke. He shakes his head. There’s just something bothering him. Is it the thought of them - _he can’t, really just can’t_ \- under the same roof as him? It can’t be that, loads of people live with their families and quite happily get on with their lives not sparing a single thought to who’s porking whom at any given time. So if it’s not Jones, and not the thought of his sister being with someone, then it’s the thought of his sister being with Jones and Dan can’t really grasp why that should cause this choking lump of misery to coagulate in his gullet. The glaring dirge-light has faded to sodium yellow by the time Claire arrives back and he’s lying in wait for her. She doesn’t appear in the least surprised that he’s not moved from exactly the same spot on the couch, overflowing ashtray on the cushion by his side. “What does that mean?” he repeats, like the past few hours haven’t elapsed at all, never mind passed in an uncomfortable reverie, staring at the scarves that festoon the ceiling like cargo netting as if the mysteries of life might be contained within their cannabis-smoked folds.

Claire folds her arms and sighs. “It’s not my place to tell you.”

“Why not? It’s both of you.”

“Dan, it’s not - it’s not _both_ of us. I’m not involved in this except that I have to bloody live here.” She sounds peeved about that last part, so much that Dan feels a little stab of affront, but soldiers on anyway.

“So you’re saying you’re _not_ sleeping with Jones?”

“Jesus, Dan, of course I’m not sleeping with him!”

He’s still none the wiser, really, but Dan can place this warm, settling feeling seeping through his bowels as ‘relief’.

 

*

 

When he sees him next, it’s days later and Jones clatters into the front room and thumps down next to him on the sofa in a cloud of raised dust motes and says, aggressively and without looking, “What’s up with _you_?”

“Itch.” Dan says. He nods at his leg, stuck stupidly straight out in front of him.

“Get a knitting needle then.”

Dan looks around at the hazard warning of a room, possibly the least likely place on earth that any form of knitting implement might be discovered, and hears from beside him the faintest snort of laughter. When he looks, Jones is watching him and the accidental eye contact feels like it’s Dan who’s been caught spying through a keyhole. He’s the first to look away. He looks at his feet. Jones is sitting with his legs spread obnoxiously wide and one of his feet poised like he might really, really want to kick Dan’s cast again. They’re so close to touching that Dan moves his foot a little so that the cast rests against Jones’s trainer. He’s not quite sure why he did it, but it feels like some kind of weird trust exercise. Beside him, he hears Jones swallow, loudly. “Does it hurt?”

“Which part?” The foot next to his traces very gently along the flat length of his cast. He can’t feel it, but supposes that’s the point. People are rarely gentle with him. “Jones?”

“What?” He says it on an exhale and something about this is starting to feel very strange indeed but if he stops or questions or looks at it directly it might break the spell, fragile and iridescent like the tensile surface of a bubble.

“Do you fancy Claire?”

He expects a sharp laugh, but it’s a quiet huff instead. “Claire? Fuck no.”

“What’s wrong with Claire?”

“Nothing’s wrong with Claire, Christ. What’s wrong with _you_?”

“You already asked me that.”

“No, I mean…”

What’s wrong with _me_. Dan wants to look at him again, on purpose, but he can’t. He compromises by moving his eyes a little further up, to where Jones’s hand is resting on the couch cushion next to his. If he were to move his hand just a little, then their little fingers would be resting side by side just like their feet. Dan imagines Jones running a single finger along his, gently, to complete the symmetry and suddenly there’s a wave of heat rolling up his chest, exploding from his collar like it’s a chimney, flames licking up his neck and cheeks. “What’s _wrong_ with me?” his voice sounds every atom like he feels.

Jones says, “Nothing. There’s _nothing_ wrong with you.” He does a funny little inhale, and Dan still can’t look at him. His hand on the couch has bitten down nails and chipped black nail polish and it bypasses the symmetry waltz and leaps suddenly straight onto his, squeezing tight.

Dan stares at him in alarm. Jones is looking at their hands. Their clasped hands. “Are you going to tell me what a brave little soldier I-”

He snaps his mouth shut when Jones looks up at him, at his blushing, goggling, stupid, _stupid_ face. “I don’t fancy Claire.” Dan wants to say something very badly indeed but everything between his ears has turned to the long-missed roaring soundtrack of home, so he just manages a shallow nod. “Don’t ever, ever jump out of, or off of, anything ever again, you dickhead.” Dan nods again, more slowly. Holding another person’s gaze for this long is some form of hypnosis, surely, a tranquiliser stronger than any codeine or morphine they drip into your veins when you’re injured. He wants to swallow; his mouth feels dry, but if he knows that if he does it’ll look obvious as when Jones did - worse, glaring, like he’s nervous - what the hell does he have to be nervous about? Nothing’s happening. They’re just sitting in the front room, looking at one another, him and Jones, him and his flatmate, his _mate_ really, just sitting here on the couch. Still clutching his hand, Jones moves his thumb in one sweep, stroking across the inside of Dan’s wrist. His skin buzzes with it, as if the touch is spreading from the source, moving up his arm like anaesthetic, taking away the pain. Dan swallows. It happens as a little noise, somewhere between clearing his throat and a whimper. He thinks Jones leans in first, but really it’s both of them at once. He keeps his eyes open and holds Jones’s stare right up till the moment when the angle will no longer allow it. Jones’s lips are soft and coffee-warm, and dry, but his tongue is wet and bold. He keeps hold of Dan’s hand and when they part he doesn’t let go and Dan thinks that perhaps this is maybe the longest eye contact he’s ever kept with anyone. “Don’t leave again.” Jones says.

Dan says, “I’m not headed anywhere.”

**Author's Note:**

> My take on what happened post-canon in the aftermath of the window incident, and why Jones didn't visit Dan at the hospital. Hope you enjoy - happy 2015!


End file.
